Technology and Writers

Hiveword user Matt N. requested that extension fields be included on the various list views. This feature is now live and affects both the basic and Plus versions of Hiveword.

First of all, what do I mean by “extension fields?”

Hiveword Plus has a feature called Custom Fields and Types. A better name might be Custom Templates. To my knowledge, this level of customizability is unique to Hiveword. Anyway, with this feature you can create new classes of things to track such as spells, spaceships, etc. But, you can all extend the factory types such as scenes, characters, etc. For example, you could add “Date” and “Scene Purpose” fields to the scene detail page if you wanted.

Prior to today’s change, you wouldn’t see your two new fields on the scene list view. Now you can!

The same treatment applies to the other built-in types. Take characters, for example:

Here, the custom field is Role and the character Hismione has an entry for it. You can see how the custom and factory fields are seamlessly displayed together.

While doing this work I revamped some things for consistency. These changes may affect you even if you are not a Hiveword Plus user. For example, the story list page now allows you to optionally display the story summary in the list. Another example is the settings list. It used to have columns for City, State, and Country. Now, there is one column but the data is displayed in a fashion consistent with the other lists. So, if you never supply data for the State field, space will not be taken up with the placeholder for it.

I hope you like these tweaks. I think the changes are nice because it concisely presents relevant information without having to drill down to details all the time. Thanks for the idea, Matt!